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Shortly after his death my mother and I had left South Africa to settle with Erasmus in Amsterdam and I went to school in England. Erasmus had always shut up like a clam when I had questioned him about my father's end. The most I could extract from him was the tribute that 'he was the world's greatest diamond-finder'. In many other respects, too, I came to the conclusion that Erasmus knew a great deal more about my father than he cared to admit.
When it came to talking about the Cullinan gem itself, however, Erasmus was much more forthcoming. He lived in the same street as the maestro Asscher who had made his reputation a couple of years before the discovery of the Cullinan by cutting the Excelsior, also from a South African mine, which, until the Cullinan itself, had been the largest diamond ever discovered. The street was as famous for diamonds as Antwerps' Pelikaanstraat for in it had also lived Coster and Voorsanger, who had re-cut the Koh-I-noor for Queen Victoria. Erasmus, a pupil of Asscher's, had been present at the cleaving of the Cullinan and had lent him the ancient diamond pencil for the job.
I had heard this story in detail many times from my grandfather: after his long study of the hidden planes of the Cullinan, Asscher was ready at last on a cold February day in 1908. He had made his final checks and had marked in with Indian ink those places which were invisible to all eyes but his.
It was a day of high drama in the freezing grey Dutch city. A police cordon was thrown around Asscher's factory. Everyone approaching was searched. A doctor and a special nurse stood by Asscher. The great man was tight with strain. He was examined by the doctor and his blood pressure found to be as high as a fighter pilot's in a dogfight. To mark the solemnity of the occasion, Asscher wore a black waistcoat. He rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow like a fencer and knotted his white overall in a big bow at the back of his neck.
He took the great diamond which he had set firmly beforehand in a shellac mixture at the end of a little solder cup, or ' dop' as it is known. Before attempting the groove which would guide the knife along the cleavage plane, Asscher paused. He, more than anyone else, knew the consequences of an error of judgment: the diamond would shatter at the stroke of the cut and only a handful of powder would remain of one of the great wonders of the world.
For a moment the master craftsman held my grandfather's diamond pencil high, poised for the first cut. Unlike its twentieth-century counterpart (called a 'sharp') its diamond cutting tip could not be revolved to change its angle for, deeper or finer cuts. It was for 'sentimental reasons', said my grandfather, that Asscher had used the old tool. He never elaborated this remark.
Then Asscher gave a little sigh and leant forward and began the incision at the top of the hidden plane. There was no sound except the rasp of diamond upon diamond. A frost of diamond dust formed as the groove deepened. Asscher ran a finger along this 'millionaire's ice', sweeping it away into a tin box below.
He then placed the cleaving knife with its specially tempered blade in the groove, holding it between his left thumb and forefinger, while his other fingers rested loosely across the 'dop'. A wooden mallet or short steel rod is used as a striker. Asscher chose the rod.
Like a marksman who fears to dwell too long on his aim, Asscher struck.
Two fragments fell into the box below — but they were not diamond. The ultra-hard steel blade had shattered. The Cullinan sat in its 'dop' — unmarked.
As if in a trance Asscher reached for the second cleaver. He fitted it into the slot. For the second time he raised the short rod above his head. A muscle twitched from the point of his chin along the line of his jaw to his left ear. The rod fell. There was a firm, sensitive click.
The Cullinan dropped in two main halves and four fragments into the tin box, and Asscher to the floor in a dead faint.
One shot — followed by two in quick succession from the direction of The Hill — jerked me back to the hard realities of my present situation: a toughs breath-robbing slog; thirst; clutching sand; and a killer at large. I had long since lost the benefits of my kaftirtulp drink. My forehead throbbed and. my right-eye vision was hazed. I was worn out and in no shape to encounter Rankin. I was almost grateful to him for blasting off periodically but the fact that nearly an hour had elapsed since his previous shot showed the extent of his tenacity. The baobab now started to look invitingly near but I had some way still to cover through sand before I would hit the first hard slopes of K2.
I set off, flagging, on this final leg, each sand-filled boot a penance. Again I could not prevent thoughts of diamonds from pushing their way to the forefront of my mind: Rankin's diamonds had pitchforked me into my present crisis and my father's diamonds had shaped my life. It was no exaggeration to say that he had tried to mould me like one of his own blasted diamond facets. My education which, because of the family's continual travelling, had largely come from him, had all been diamond-orientated. To him (and therefore to me)" the heroes of history were the heroes of diamonds, the lines of my geography the courses of diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes, my mathematics the intricacies of metric carat measurement. Even my study of languages had been tainted with the jargonsmatterings of the diamond races — Yiddish, Hindustani, Persian and Arabic. Because twelve of the world's fifty major diamonds are South African, my father had indoctrinated me about South Africa. Its history, however, had no meaning for him before 1867 when two youths found a blink-klip on the banks of the Orange River near a one-horse village called Hopetown. It was inevitable that we should have made a sentimental journey to the place. There remain to this day on the window of a local store scratch marks which were made to test a diamond which was to rocket to world acclaim as the 83-carat Star of South Africa, and 'begin the country's diamond rush. My father carried his infatuation so far as to force me to study Alexander the Great's campaigns — not as campaigns but because he maintained that diamond mining had originated with Alexander the Great when he had ordered his soldiers to recover gems from a snake-guarded pit. The ingenious conqueror had used lanoline-soaked sheepskins to which the diamonds stuck. The modem vibrating-table with its grease-covered terraces over which diamond concentrate is sluiced was, in my father's eyes, merely a sophisticated development of Alexander's 330 BC idea.
My father's death came almost as a relief from this sort of thing and formal schooling in England made a welcome contrast. I did a lot of yachting and joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war. I was captured during a cross-Channel Combined Operations strike and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. My mother was shot by the Gestapo in Amsterdam: I never heard why.